Michael Lewis’ book Moneyball was a marvelous read, but seemed like dim source material for a movie. Credit, then, is due to the creators of the film version–the various producers, screenwriters Steven Zailian and Aaron Sorkin, and director Bennett Miller–for finding a compelling narrative spine in a true-life story about the change in an […]

  SATISFACTION:  Thursday 10PM on USA Previously… on SATISFACTION:  The Trumans, Neil (Matt Passmore) and Grace (Stephanie Szostak) have comfortable suburban lives that are breaking apart.  Neil, an investment manager, delivers a diatribe about his life on an airliner marooned on the runway, which becomes a YouTube punchline.  Grace, regretful that she abandoned her design […]

  THE WALKING DEAD:  Sunday 9PM on AMC The Season 7 premiere of THE WALKING DEAD didn’t have a lot of goals.  The series managed somehow, in this age of spoiler culture and social media, to keep the off-camera victim of its Season 6 finale murder a mystery–no easy feat–and it had to pay off […]

  Season 1 of THE MAGICIANS had plenty of flaws, but lack of ambition wasn’t one of them.  In a way unseen on Syfy since the days of Battlestar Galactica, The Magicians wanted to be about everything:  Harry Potter, The Chronicles of Narnia, Doctor Who, the very concept of the supernatural as escapist entertainment, the […]

> MAGIC CITY:  Premieres Friday April 6 at 10PM on Starz – Potential DVR Alert Starz’s new MAGIC CITY is another stroll down Mad Men lane:  glamorous people in impeccably detailed 1960s settings (technically very late 1950s), smoking, drinking to excess, having lots of illicit sex, and generally enjoying what they don’t know is their […]

  The first season of CW’s musical-comedy CRAZY EX-GIRLFRIEND was by far the most daring and distinctive show on broadcast television, but a nagging question remained:  what could it do for an encore?  It wasn’t clear how long the story could follow Rebecca Bunch (series co-creator Rachel Bloom) in her stalking of one-time summer camp […]

  The curtain rang down on the 4th season of WHITE COLLAR tonight, an unusually labored one.  The show still has a fair amount of style and charm, but it’s starting to feel as shackled as Neal Caffrey’s ankle bracelet (and harder to slip out of). Partly the series is a victim of its own […]

> V/H/S, which screened as part of Sundance’s Park City At Midnight series, is a gimmick piled upon a gimmick. First is the horror anthology itself, familiar from the Twilight Zone movie and Rod Serling’s Night Gallery TV show, among many others.  In this case, half a dozen unrelated short films, each from a different […]